Heya, cats and kittens. Latest updates on what is going on here at the Project:

1. The project is paid up for the next year (yay!)

2. We have added Facebook functionality, but are still not going to use Facebook connect for various reasons. Please share, like, and generally make us famous as you will.

3. We have have added a button to make donations to the Project. No, we are not any form of recognized non-profit organization, so you aren’t going to get a tax write-off out of it, but your donations are still appreciated and will help defray the cost of the domain and server.

4. We have added a little shoutbox on the sidebar. This is for those times you want to interact or add a little something to the Project, but don’t have the material for a real post.

Also, I wanted to point out the different categories built into the posting interface: we have “Status Update”, “Blog Post”, “Quote”, and “Link”. Each of these sets up the formatting of the post in certain ways, and I want to encourage everyone to use the right one for the right kind of post. I also want to point out the “Upload/Insert” buttons, which will allow you to post media like vids and pics, which I want to encourage as well.

That’s it for now. Enjoy!

So, the Bilderberg group is meeting in Sitges. In case you haven’t heard of it, it is a kind of global steering committee which discusses and, depending on who you listen to, plans, the economic and political direction to be taken by national governments.

To which the “conspiricy theory” alarm bells start ringing.

I think there are two responses to this. The first relates to what we know about the world and how we receive, evaluate, assimilate and disseminate that information. The second relates to the regulatory role that the accusation of subscribing to a conspiracy theory plays in maintaining a homeostatic equilibrium when it comes to opinion forming.

On the first point, it is becoming increasingly evident, not just the extent to which the the media is biased or presents a distorted view of the world, but the way in which the media encloses us within a completely closed field. Take the North Korean sinking of a South Korean ship. I don’t doubt that that is what happened, the North Korean regime is clearly unstable and unpredictable, there was an international panel of experts which looked into the case and concluded that the sinking was almost certainly caused by the North Koreans.

Why don’t I doubt it? I know next to nothing about the case. What I do know has been gleaned from fragments of news reports on the radio, headlines and first paragraphs of stories in newspapers and on websites, a few images of the ship recovered from the seabed and the slightly comical image of Kim Jong-il, which has never quite recovered from its treatment in Team America. None of this, even if you add to it my slightly sketchy grasp of the history of the relations between the two countries, amounts to anything that could be considered evidence. But that’s the point. I have delegated the role of context setting to the media, accepting as true that which is not put into question across the range of different media. It’s as if I divine attitudes and opinions on the basis of their implicit assumption in the media. And this is not intended to be a confessional- I am convinced that even the most radical cyber-warrior or activist is subject to exactly the same regulatory influences, just not exactly where they look. It’s as if there is a point beyond which it is no longer socially expedient to call things into question. Not for obviously ideological reasons, but more because such questioning would remove the grounds upon which dialogue with other people is possible. Tucked into the margins of everyday conversation, we therefore find a powerful regulatory mechanism which acts to maintain something like social homeostasis. If we’re going to talk about the sinking of the South Korean ship, it must proceed on the assumption of North Korean culpability because to question this would undermine the smooth functioning of the social field (the conversation in this case) and so represent a threat to the homeostatic equilibrium of the social body. Being right is not really what comes first in our list of concerns, being coherent and keeping the conversation fluid are far more important. It is within the various media that the parameters are established, and potentially challenged, regarding which narratives (in the form of opinions, facts and assumptions) are ‘in play’.

We tend to veer away from conspiracy theorists. We start looking around in a contained panic for the exits. I met an alien fanatic one time. He waited a decent amount of time before he swung the conversation around to aliens, but once he got there, there was no letting up. The problem wasn’t the ideas- it was the sense that you had been trapped in a self-contained field, the functionality and fluidity of which had been bought at the expense of its integration into the broader social field. The guy made sense and spoke at break-neck speed, but also seemed anxious, paraniod and strangely lonely. This could be explained by the fact that, at least while he was rapping about aliens, he wasn’t embedded in the social field of regulated discourse. Of course, the field of aliens and ufology contain their own regulatory mechanisms, but importantly these fall beyond the parametres established by the various media, and are therefore inherently suspect. Consequently, there is no fluidity between the field of aliens and the broader social field. You are not being asked to traverse the contours of the social field, but to break with it.

Talking to a ufologist, talking to a jehovah’s witness and talking to a committed Marxist can often be very similar experiences. In part this is because what you are facing is a challenge to the integrity of the field of legitimated narratives which you know you are not going to accept. All that remains is to look for the exits.

This is all well understood and for this reason accusing someone of being a conspiracy theorist with respect to an opinion that they hold, plays a very powerful regulatory role in the maintainance of homeostatic equilibrium. No one wants to be accused of being a conspiracy theorist. In conversation, and also in contemplation, the formation and dissemination of our opinions is strongly influenced by this recognition that their are certain nexus of opinions that threaten to enclose us within a coherent, yet utterly limited field. We recognise that this field will compromise the smooth working of the broader field of opinions, attitudes etc… which we need to traverse in order to be social players and which is regulated, primarily, by the traditional media.

The role of social networking sites and blogs and fora etc is clearly very important and with time will be transformative (or better, will hold a strategically crucial place in the the more general transformation which is occurring) . The cracks that are appearing in the legitimacy of the traditional media are, in part, related to this static of unregulated opinion. However, I think that the traditional media, which obviously includes the on-line presence of newspapers, television and radio, are still instrumental in framing and legitimizing opinions, attitudes, perceptions and even reality.

So what are we to make of the Bilderberg conference and the various conspiracies that swirl around it? Should we laugh it off and allow the social field to continue functioning smoothly. Or should we be alerted to the fact that the various media have, for the last 50 years or so, obediently withheld from reporting on an event that, under any normal circumstances, would be a massive media magnet. And this is the same media which effectively frames our perception of reality at least as it is played out on the national and international level. I think that at this time, when we can see cracks opening up within that framework, we should take it very seriously. Britain and America have been embroiled in wars over the past eight years that were clearly embarked on for reasons that had nothing to do with the official line. Anyone with a pulse can see this. We have just witnessed an election in the UK which was conducted under conditions of national sedation. The vitally important questions about how we are going to transform consumption habits and turn the banking sector into something that is socially useful were not touched on. An awful lot of anesthetizing flattery was dished out. What’s more, and this is an on-going issue, the interpenetration of different estates (politics, business, banking and the media most notably) that we generally take to be separate was and is at no time highlighted. Neither was the way that they increasingly seem to operate in a coordinated way on a global level in the interests of a very small elite.

Bilderberg is an annual meeting of this elite. Stuff conspiracy theories. For all its smooth appearance, something is seriously wrong with the social field and our perception of how it operates. No one is in a privileged position with respect to this, no one ‘knows what’s really going on’. But don’t be cornered into passively shrugging your shoulders because you don’t want to be labelled a conspiracy theorist. The world is in an immensely unstable state and the policies being pursued by our leaders are clearly aggravating the situation. Whatever it is that they are discussing in Sitges, I think we should absolutely take it seriously.

We are the media. We own the media. There will never be anything they can truly “cover up” again.

Gotta say, I admire their fighting spirit.

Background on the story can be found here.

Do to renewed interest, the Project will be staying up and at it’s currently location. Thanks, everyone.

I enjoyed the video on the empathic civilization a lot, and it certainly made me want to believe, but he does leave out an awful lot.

Those same technologies that extend our central nervous system and bring us into contact with people from all over the planet condition how we understand and relate to those people. There may have been a big response to Haiti, but that’s because it was a clearly defined media spectacle that lent itself to an out-pouring of generosity. A timely counter balance to that example is the fact that that in the Niger Delta in Africa, the aging oil infrastructure bleeds the same volume of oil annually into the Delta as has been spilled into the Gulf of Mexico over the past few weeks. The effects on the inhabitants, whose lives are already desperately precarious, has been devastating (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/30/oil-spills-nigeria-niger-delta-shelI). I haven’t seen much empathy flowing from Europe or America for these people. Sure if it was prioritized by the traditional media in a very focused and coordinated way, there may be a trickle of empathy, but even so that would remain just an instance of a global inequality so widespread, pervasive and structural that people’s patience with it would soon wear thin.

I’m not much more optimistic about the social media. In the first place I don’t believe they can organise information and set the agenda in the same way as the traditional media. Secondly, and more importantly, given that most people have never used a telephone, let alone coolly surfed the social networking sites, the world simply doesn’t correspond to the geographically proportionate sphere that the fantastic cartoonist drew. If you were to draw a spatial representation of the globe based not on geographical space, but internet usage, Africa would be all but invisible. As Manuel Castells pointed out in his “the Internet Galaxy” the new technologies create a networked world which, in fact, has a far greater tendency to exclude those who are not connected.

So, while I don’t disagree with the fact that our technologies and media transform our perception of the world and sense of community, I would take issue with naively optimistic assumptions about the spread of empathy. As things stand I think technological narcissism is closer to the mark.

PS: Can’t we get this site firing? Maybe there’s more latent interest that the number of postings would suggest.

Oliver           http://www.socialacceleration.blogspot.com/

Watch This.

And what will allow this to happen is social media. Mark my words.

Hi out there just joined this. Does anyone know if there are as yet any interesting books or articles on philosophical approaches to social networking?

Judgment – I am wondering what all your thoughts are regarding judging the way people use social media. Top trends on Twitter this week:

* New Moon.
* Modern Warfare
* #theresway2manys.
* #youmightbealiberal
* #youknowyouruglyif

By making communication easy, are we hurting its value? I think by making communication easy we are expanding the human connection, maybe even getting closer. But I wonder about what we share, and what that means…

Patterns of recognition

We have to notice that message of the media have always had /possesed information that man and media are one entity. That kind of information would be cool, iconic, spherically media, because of incorporation into one idea of man, nature, society and culture.

            In that case all the rest of the patterns of recognition would have some sort of circlessness, spheressness, we would say and curve no matter they were founded on the effects of mechanical technology, which is linear, or under the effect of organic technology, inclusive, circle and synaesthetic.

            Thus, the patterns of recognition of typographic culture, founded on the effect of Gutenberg print, must have that cooler part as well, because the print, no matter being hot itself, have had within its message end cool information-that the media is a part of a man.

            It seems to me that the very moment has not been discovered yet. So, in the typographic culture patterns of recognition have been created, unconsciously, only in harmony with visible side of the objective nature of print, and that is specialism, fragmentation, individualization.

            Curve  is not incorporated, so the typographic patterns of recognition are not enough precise and correct. There is a hidden reality behind them, and that reality would be discovered if the synaesthetic part of print-that the media is a part of man-was appreciated.

            Patterns of recognition in mathematics, biology, chemistry, physics…have to have curve  and only then they could be good tools to discover reality: chemical, physical, biological, etc.

            The medium is physics and chemistry. When the medium is undergoing the change, both physical and chemical reality is undergoing the change. Curve of space-time has been discovered in the phase of  the emphasizing  of a hot, mechanical media into a cool, collectivistic, organic media. Though, typographic patterns of recognition have had to be in the start curved and spherically, and not only based on the intrinsic values of print-individualization, specialism and fragmentation. They didn’t incalculated cool part of the message of print-that media is a part of man. Had they done it, that patterns would have been more correct and precise.

            They discovered only linear, fragmented and segmented reality, analytically distincted and categorized. For example, chemic elements are not discovered precisely ie. their connections between atoms and molecules. They have to carry some dosage of circlesness, not only explosive specialism, fragmentation and individualization. The non-correct patterns of recognition had been constructed.

            In the phase of television, patterns of recognition became more cooler and more non-correct. It was, in postmodernism, the action of deconstruction of not good enough constructed typographic patterns of recognition. Why? Because objective nature of television did not allow that and again it was not confessed that the media is a part of man. Objective nature of television and electric technology is not synaesthetic, tactile. Without individualism there is no synaesthesy. And there is no real individualism in the culture of television. Neotribalism is not possible without an individualism. Cool television is only a half-cool, synaesthetic media and there is a weaker specialization of man, society, nature and culture under its influence. Television takes civilization into a nothing, nihilism and disappearances.

            Television patterns of recognition are false because that did not confirm that media is a part of man; because they are created upon the effects of fake cool media; because they deconstructed not enough precise constructed typographic patterns of recognition.

            When it comes to the Internet, science must also confirm its superindividualistic side, and not only collectivistic.

            Science must confirm that media and man are one. If it doesn’t, patterns of recognition will be more and more non-correct.

            In that case, human gene is under the deconstruction, and humankind will destroy itself and will face the biological disappearance.

                                                                                                                        Leonid Zuvic, communicologist

Contact: lznovinereporter@gmail.com

WriteNewMedia, Social Media Philosophy, and Social Media Superheroes are For Sale

Obviously, I haven’t been posting. I have been focusing on my writing and trying to break in to both the comics and screewriting industries. I simply don’t have the time to devote myself to what I really want to be doing and keep up with the blogs.

So all my sites are up for sale:

1. http://writenewmedia.com
2. http://socialmediaphilosophy.com
3. http://socialmediasuperheroes.com

Social Media Superheroes never took off, the other two have content. I would prefer, of course, if the content and purpose of the sites are maintained, but the entire sites minus my personal data are up for sale. SMP has a PR of 3 and WNM has a PR of 4, both get reasonable traffic and are good domains.

So make me an offer. If I can’t sell them by the next time my accounts expire I am just going to pull down the sites. Contact me at thepuckwrites [@] gmail.com.

It’s been fun, thanks to all my readers and users for the support. This isn’t about you, you have all been wonderful. This is just one of those life-choice things. I wish you all the best.

Since the Project was conceived as a group project, upon sale of the site, all member created content other than my own will be deleted (members: I have backups if you need the articles) to protect your material. Project members who are interested in buying the Project have priority consideration and trump outside offers.